by David Smetters, CEO, Respondus Inc.
A recent article in a psychology journal presents evidence that learning styles are a bunch of bunk.
The authors express it more eloquently, but their conclusion is that students can learn equally well using a variety of learning styles. More than that, they assert that students don’t learn information any better when their preferred learning styles are used.
I’m a science wonk. I was trained in social research and I crave the scientific method. So what does this study really tell us, assuming that the methodology is solid?
It tells us that students are intelligent beings, capable of learning information in many different ways. It tells us that students can learn from written text, pictures, and from speech.
What’s missing in this study is the cultural context in which learning occurs. I don’t question whether today’s students are intelligent enough to learn using different methods. I’m even willing to concede that students learn equally well using different approaches in an experimental setting.
But education doesn’t occur in an experimental setting. There are hundreds of variables and competing factors that impact a student’s learning experience. As an educator, I compete with Facebook, text messages, YouTube, uninvolved parents, girlfriends, children, work, late nights, and hangovers. I compete with other instructors who teach the same course, other universities selling the same degree. I deal with teacher evaluations, government regulations, student satisfaction surveys, retention rates, and outcomes.
Herein is the importance of learning styles. It’s about cutting through the noise, enticing students to learn what you want them to learn. It’s about meeting students where they are, even if you think it’s ridiculous where they are. It’s about cutting the learning objectives into small, bite-sized pieces so students don’t choke or spit it out.
Today’s learners are multi-taskers and media sponges. They are cynics and Sophists. They have a little knowledge about a lot of things. As an instructor you can’t stand in front of a classroom and tell students to learn it your way or hit the highway. Because you know what? They will hit the highway. They’ll switch to another class, or even to another school. If learners don’t like your teaching style, they’ll solve it with a click.
Teaching styles matter. Learning styles matter. They are two sides of the same coin. It’s not whether a student has the capacity to learn a certain way. It’s about offering compelling and competitive ways to get students to learn what you want them to learn.
Our StudyMate product is a powerful example of why learning styles are important. Anyone who spends two minutes with StudyMate sees that the process of learning can be interesting and fun. It’s not that students can’t learn from lectures or by reading textbooks. It’s about engaging learners with technologies that are familiar and enjoyable. It’s about making learning interactive and social, just like a student’s daily life. It’s recognizing that learning is a part of life, and that life involves culture, and that today’s culture wants more than traditional lectures and textbooks.
StudyMate is also about giving students flexibility in how and when they want to learn. It supports both collaborative and individualized learning. Students can learn on PCs, Macs, smartphones or tablets … online or offline … in a classroom or on the lawn. This flexibility is important to today’s learners and it’s intertwined with learning styles.
I’ll close with this simple challenge. Click the button below and spend a few minutes learning some stuff with StudyMate. If you’re like most people, you’ll find it compelling and a bit addictive. And while it’s unscientific and anecdotal, it’s simple proof that the process of learning matters. Learning styles do matter.
Other Articles by David Smetters:
Why Students Cheat
Googleplex: In Search of Education
Respondus Inc.’s Mobile Strategy
The journal article mentioned was referenced in several mainstream publications and blogs. I’m glad you wrote this piece because I too felt the authors ignored so many factors that go into education. I see application of their results in home schooling where parents fret over the curriculum to use. But these authors took their experimental results (which I do find interesting, btw) and over-generalized the applicability to education. It would be bad policy for mainstream educators to follow those conclusions.
I object to a few things in this article. First, the author discounts experimental findings simply because they occur in an experimental setting. As a trained social scientist, he should be aware that this is an extremely weak argument. I believe the author’s problem with the findings has more to do with reluctance to give up a cherished notion that is linked to profitable enterprise, than it does with the scientific merit of the study or its generalizability. Second, since when do universities “sell” degrees? Let’s not cave in to this way of thinking or speaking. Third, I object to the implication that today’s students are infantile beings who need information to be chopped into “small, bite-sized pieces so that they don’t choke or spit it out”. Yes, we can probably make them into infantile beings if we treat them as such, but is this really our goal as educators?
I winced as I read this article. I don’t know if it’s because I disagreed, or if it was simply a poignant reaction to the reality of education today. College instructors do adjust (pander?) to students. We do give them what they want, and we succumb to the guidance (coercion?) from administrators and accreditation bodies. Personally, I think much of this is driven by the for-profit universities who ARE selling degrees. They are shaking up higher education because their sole focus is on retention and outcomes. How do you retain students? You give them what they want and hope they hang on to graduation (ka-ching!). I don’t need an experiment to explain this (depressing) reality.
I liked the article and I liked David’s response. However, I think the learning styles theory does depend on other theoretical areas eg multiple intelligences and multimodal discourse, which don’t fix an individual as “a visual learner”. Some applications of learning styles do just his, incorrectly in my humble opinion, but I guess this allows easy business development.
Learning one way or another has different repercussions as to the transferability of the knowledge/activity learned. You can’t learn how to ride a bike with just MCQs. You can’t learn how to surf the net by writing an essay. You often can’t succeed in academia if you don’t master how to read thick textbooks (think dyslexic students). Its about literacies, not just personal cognition.
There was a good point in the response too – about “real world” factors or situatedness (see Lave and Wenger). The maths we learn at school is not necessarily the maths we use in the supermarket. The experiments done in labs reflect only controlled variable manipulation, not the everyday mix of competing variables. Social science is complex stuff.
The authors do call for a much more robust research into learning styles and this is probably a good call. But they shouldn’t really claim yet that learning styles is all junk as they only did one “experiment”. Interesting debate, gonna search for the methodology in the article, let’s see if they tell us empirically, and exactly, how they did the experiment, as a physicist would have too.
I tend to agree with the author. The students that want to learn, will, regardless of the teacher, teachers style or text. Motivation is internal and its very very difficult for a teacher to compete with the multi-million dollar entertainment and productions that students are exposed to.